‘Emily Russo,’ Minnie announces with funereal awe, ‘has got cancer. She’s in this Hospital right now. I want to tell you, anybody who knows her, she might like company. She still can have visitors on account of she’s got no kin to stand by….’
‘Gee, I didn’t know that,’ Mary Ellen says slowly. ‘That’s a shame.’
‘It was the last Cancer Check showed it up,’ says Mrs Rafferty. ‘She’s just hanging on by a thread. Those new drugs help with the pain, of course. The only thing is, sick as she is, Emily’s counting on coming back to her job. She loves that job, it’s been her life these forty years, and Doctor Gilman doesn’t want to tell her the hard facts as to how she isn’t ever going back for fear of giving her a shock and all. Everybody who comes in to see her, she asks, “Is the job filled yet? Have they got anybody yet down in Admissions?” The minute that job’s filled Emily’ll think it’s her own death warrant, plain and simple.’
‘How about a substitute?’ Cora wants to know. ‘You could say whoever-it-was was pinch-hitting, sort of.’
Mrs Rafferty shakes her smooth, gilded head. ‘No, Emily’s to the point she wouldn’t believe it, she’d think we were just jollying her along. People in her state get awfully keen. We can’t risk that. I go down to Admissions myself, when I can, and lend a hand. It’s only,’ her voice drops, sober as an undertaker’s, ‘a little while now, Doctor Gilman says.’
Minnie looks about to cry. The whole meeting is in a worse state than when Mrs Rafferty walked in, everybody bowing their heads over their cigarettes or picking away at their nail polish. ‘Now, now, girls, don’t take on so,’ Mrs Rafferty says, with a bright, rallying glance round. ‘Emily couldn’t be in a better place for care, I’m sure we’ll all agree, and Doctor Gilman is like a relative to her, she’s known him these ten years. And you can go visit her, she’d love that….’
‘How about flowers?’ Mary Ellen puts in. There is a general murmur of approval. Every time anybody in our group gets sick, or engaged, or married, or a baby (though that is a lot rarer than the rest) or a Service Award, we chip in and send flowers, or a suitable gift, and cards. This is the first terminal case I’ve been in on, though; if I do say so, the girls couldn’t have been sweeter about it.
‘How about pink, something cheerful?’ Ida Kline suggests.
‘A wreath, why not?’ a recently-engaged little typist from the Pool says softly. ‘A big pink wreath, carnations maybe.’
‘Not a wreath, girls!’ Mrs Rafferty groans. ‘With Emily so touchy not a wreath, for heaven’s sake!’
‘A vase, then,’ says Dotty. ‘The nurses are always complaining about no vases. A real nice vase, maybe from the Hospital Gift Shop, they have these imported vases, and a mixed bouquet in the vase from the Hospital Florist’s.’
‘Now that is a very good idea, Dorothy.’ Mrs Rafferty sounds relieved. ‘That’s much more the type of thing. How many of you girls agree on a vase with a mixed bouquet?’ Everybody, including the little typist, raises their hands. ‘Now I’ll just put you in charge of that, Dorothy,’ Mrs Rafferty says. ‘Leave your contributions with Dorothy, girls, before you go, and we’ll send around a card this afternoon for everyone to sign.’
The meeting breaks up then, everybody talking to everybody else, and some of the girls are already digging dollar bills out of their bags and shoving them across the table at Dotty.
‘Quiet!’ Mrs Rafferty calls out. ‘Quiet please, one more minute, girls!’ In the hush that follows, the siren of a nearing ambulance raises and lets fall its banshee wail, passing under our windows, fading around the corner, and ceasing at last at the Emergency Ward entrance. ‘I meant to tell you. About the hurricane, girls, in case you were wondering what the procedure is. The latest bulletin from the Head Office says things may start blowing up around noon, but you’re not to worry. Keep calm. Business as usual’ (amused laughter from the Typing Pool) ‘and above all don’t show any concern you may have over the hurricane to the patients. They’ll be nervous enough without that. Those of you who live far out, if it’s too bad, can stay over in the Hospital tonight. Cots are being set up in the halls of the Clinics’ Building, and we have the third floor all marked out for you girls, barring any emergency.’
At this point, the swinging doors open with a bump, and a nurse walks in pushing the coffee-maker on a metal food-cart. Her rubber-soled shoes creak as though she was stepping on live mice. ‘Meeting adjourned,’ says Mrs Rafferty. ‘Coffee, everyone.’
Dotty draws me away from the crush around the coffee urn. ‘Cora’s bound to have coffee, but that stuff’s so bitter I can’t stomach it. And in paper cups, yet.’ Dotty makes a little grimace of distaste. ‘Why don’t you and me go blow this money on a vase and flowers for Miss Emily right here and now.’
‘Okay.’ Leaving the room with Dotty, I notice she is walking with short choppy strides. ‘Say, what’s with you? You don’t want to buy a vase?’
‘It’s not a vase I mind, it’s the thought of that old lady up there being fed all this soft soap. She’s going to die, she should have decent time to get used to the idea, see a priest, not hear everything’s finesy-winesy.’ Dotty started taking a novitiate, she told me once, before she knew what the world was about, only, she said, she could no more keep her eyes down and her hands folded neatly in her sleeves or her tongue still than she could stand on her head and recite the Greek alphabet backwards. Every now and then, though, I feel her convent training showing through, like the sheen of her fair skin under the pink and peach-colored powder she uses.
‘You should have been a missionary,’ I say. By this time we are up to the Gift Shop, a spiffy bandbox of a place, with fancy goods stacked from floor to ceiling—fluted vases, breakfast cups enamelled with hearts-and-flowers, wedding-dress dolls and china bluebirds, gilt-edged card decks, cultured pearls, all you can think of, and every bit of it priced too high for anybody but a loving relative with his mind on something besides his pocket-book. ‘She’s better off not knowing,’ I add, since Dotty doesn’t say anything.
‘I’ve got half a mind to tell her.’ Dotty picks up a big purple bubble-glass vase with a wide ruffle of glass around the rim and glares at it. ‘This We-know-better-than-you-do business around here gives me the creeps every so often. I sometimes think if there weren’t any Cancer Check-ups or any National Diabetes Weeks with booths in the hall for you to test your own sugar, there wouldn’t be so much cancer or diabetes, if you see what I mean.’
‘Now you’re talking like those Christian Science types,’ I say. ‘And by the way, I think that vase is too loud for an old lady like Miss Emily.’
Dotty gives me an odd little smile, takes the vase up to the saleslady at the counter and plonks down six dollars for it. Now instead of keeping to the kitty money she has left over after blowing most of it on the vase, Dotty adds a couple of dollars of her own, and, I must admit, so do I, without much prodding on her part. When the florist next door comes up, rubbing his hands and looking equally ready for congratulations or condolences, to ask what we want, a dozen long-stem roses, or maybe a bachelor’s-button and babies’-breath corsage with silver-ribbon, Dotty holds out the purple bubble-glass vase. ‘Something of everything, buster. Fill her up.’
The florist peers at Dotty, one side of his mouth skipping up in a little smile, the other side waiting until he can be sure she’s just joshing him. ‘Come on, come on.’ Dotty thumps the vase up and down the glass counter, causing the florist to wince and rapidly relieve her of it. ‘Like I said. Tea roses, carnations, some of those whatyamacallums …’
The florist’s eyes follow Dotty’s finger. ‘Gladioluses,’ he supplies in a pained tone.
‘Gladolus. Some of them, different colours—red, orange, yellow, you know. And a couple of those purple irises …’
‘Ah, they’ll match the vase,’ the florist says, starting to get into the spirit of the thing. ‘And an assortment of anemones?’
‘That too,’ Dotty says. ‘Except it sounds
like a rash.’
We are out of the florist’s in short order, through the covered passageway between the Clinics’ Building and the Hospital proper, and up on an elevator to Miss Emily’s floor, Dotty bearing the purple vase jammed with this bouquet.
‘Miss Emily?’ Dotty whispers as we tiptoe into the four-bed ward. A nurse glides out from behind the curtains drawn around the bed in the far corner by the window.
‘Shh.’ She puts her fingers to her lips and points back at the curtains. ‘In there. Don’t stay too long.’
Miss Emily is sunk back into the pillows, her eyes open and filling most of her face, her hair spread out in a grey fan on the pillow round her head. Bottles of all sorts are on the medicine table, on the floor under the bed, and hung up around the bed. Thin rubber tubes lead off from a couple of the bottles, one tube disappearing under the bed covers and one tube going right up into Miss Emily’s left nostril. There is no sound in the room but the dry rustle of Miss Emily’s breathing, no motion but the faint heave of the sheet over her chest and the air bubbles sending up their rhythmic silver balloons in one of these bottles of fluid. In the unhealthy storm-light from the window Miss Emily looks like a wax dummy, except for her eyes, which fix on us. I can almost feel them burning into my skin, they are so keen.
‘We brought these flowers, Miss Emily.’ I point to the enormous multi-colored vaseful of hothouse blooms Dotty is setting down on the medicine table. The table is so small she first has to clear away all the jars and glasses and pitchers and spoons on to the bottom shelf to make room.
Miss Emily’s eyes slide to this heap of flowers. Something flickers there. I feel I am watching two candles at the end of a long hall, two pinpoint flames blowing and recovering in a dark wind. Outside the window the sky is blacker than a cast-iron skillet.
“The girls sent them.’ Dotty takes Miss Emily’s inert, waxen hand from where it lies on the coverlet. ‘The card’ll be up later, everybody’s signing it, only we didn’t want to wait with the flowers.’
Miss Emily tries to speak. A faint hiss and rattle escape her lips, no words you can make out.
Still, Dotty seems to know what she means. ‘The job is there Miss Emily,’ she says, spacing her words clear and slow, the way you explain things to a very young child. ‘They’re holding it open.’ The selfsame words Mrs Rafferty would use, I thought wonderingly. Only Mrs Rafferty would add something to spoil it: You’ll be up and around in a jiffy, Miss Emily, don’t you fret. Or, You’ll be getting your Gold Fifty Year Service Bracelet yet, Miss Emily, just you wait and see. The queer thing is, Dotty doesn’t give any impression of twisting the facts into a fib. She is telling the honest truth, saying: Everybody is flying around like chickens with their heads off in Admissions, Miss Emily, because they want you to know you aren’t replaceable. Not so soon, not so fast.
Miss Emily lets the lids droop over her eyes. Her hand goes limp in Dotty’s palm, and she sighs, a sigh that passes with a shudder through her whole body.
‘She knows’ Dotty says to me as we leave Miss Emily’s bed. ‘She knows now.’
‘But you didn’t tell her. Not in so many words.’
‘Whaddayou think I am?’ Dotty is indignant. ‘No heart or something? Say,’ she breaks off suddenly, as we step out of the doorway into the hall, ‘who’s that?’
A lean, slight figure is propped up against the wall in the empty corridor a short way down from Miss Emily’s door. As we approach, the figure flattens back against the wall, as if it could by some miracle become part of the pale, green-painted plaster material and vanish from sight. In the dim corridor, the electric lights give the effect of early nightfall.
‘Billy Monihan!’ Dotty exclaims. ‘What in the name of goodness are you doing here?’
‘Wuh-wuh-waiting,’ Billy manages to squeak, his face flushing a painful shade of red under the crimson overlay of pimples and boils. He is a very short boy, almost as short as Dotty, and extremely thin, although he has attained his full growth and has nothing more to expect in that line. His long black hair is slicked back with some sort of redolent hair oil and shows the furrows of a comb drawn recently through the glossed, patent-leather surface.
‘Just what,’ Dotty straightens to her full height, and in her heels she has the edge on Billy, ‘do you think you’re doing hanging around up here?’
‘Juh-just … wuh-waiting.’ Billy ducks his head to avoid Dotty’s gimlet eye. He seems to be making an effort to swallow his tongue so as to be beyond all communication whatsoever.
‘You should be trotting up records from Record Room in the Clinics’ Building right this minute,’ Dotty says. ‘You don’t know Miss Emily from Adam, you leave Miss Emily alone, hear?’
A weird, indecipherable gurgle escapes from Billy’s throat. ‘Shuh-shuh-she suh-said I cuh-could come,’ he gets out then.
Dotty gives a sharp, exasperated snort. Still, something in Billy’s eye makes her turn away and leave him to his devices. By the time the elevator stops for us, Billy has melted, pimples, slick hair, stutter, and all, into Miss Emily’s room.
‘I don’t like that boy, that boy’s a regular,’ Dotty pauses for the right word, ‘a regular vulture. There’s something funny with him these days, let me tell you. He hangs around that Emergency Ward entrance, you’d think the Lord God himself was supposed to come in that door and announce Judgement Day.’
‘He’s seeing Doctor Resnik in our place,’ I say, ‘only I haven’t got any of the audograph records on him to type up yet, so I don’t know. Did it come on sudden, this vulture business?’
Dotty shrugs. ‘All I know is, he scared Ida Kline sick in Typing Pool last week, telling her some story or other about a woman came into Skin Clinic all purple and swollen fat as an elephant in a wheelchair with this tropical disease. Ida couldn’t eat her lunch for thinking of it. They’ve got a name for it, these people who hang around bodies and all. Nega … negafills. They get real bad, they start digging up bodies right out of the graveyard.’
‘I was doing an Intake Report on a woman yesterday,’ I say. ‘She sounds something like that. Couldn’t believe her little girl had died, kept seeing her around, at church services, in the grocery store. Visited the graveyard day in, day out. One day, she says, the little girl comes to see her, dressed in this white lace smock, and says not to worry, she’s in heaven and well taken care of, doing just fine.’
‘I wonder,’ Dotty says. ‘I wonder how do you cure that?’
From the hospital cafeteria where we are sitting around one of the big tables over dessert and signing Miss Emily’s Get-Well-Quick card, I can see the rain swatting in long lines against the windows overlooking the Garden Court. Some wealthy lady had the Court built and filled up with grass and trees and flowers so the doctors and nurses could have something prettier than brick walls and gravel to look at while they ate. Now the windows are streaming so you can’t even see the color green through the sheets of water.
‘You girls going to stay over?’ Cora’s voice is wobbly as the jello she is spooning up, ‘I mean, I don’t know what to do with mother home alone. What if the lights go out, she might break a hip hunting around for candles in the cellar in the dark, and the roof shingles are none too good, they leak through the attic even if it’s just a shower….’
‘You stay, Cora,’ Dotty says with decision. ‘You try going home in this soup, you’ll be drowned silly. You call up home tomorrow morning, you’ll find your mother happy as a cricket with the storm blowing itself out a hundred miles away up Maine someplace.’
‘Look!’ I say, partly to distract Cora. ‘Here’s Mrs Rafferty just come in with her tray. Let’s get her to sign.’ Before any of us can wave, Mrs Rafferty spots us and comes over, a white sloop in full sail, her stethoscope earrings bobbing on either side of a face that means nothing but bad news.
‘Girls,’ she says, seeing the card lying open there on the table in front of us, ‘girls, I don’t like to be the bearer of sad tidings, but I have to tell you
that card won’t be needed.’
Cora turns the color of putty under her freckles, a spoonful of strawberry jello suspended halfway to her mouth.
‘Emily Russo passed away not an hour ago.’ Mrs Rafferty bows her head for a second, and lifts it with a certain fortitude. ‘It’s all for the best girls, you know that as well as I do. She passed on easy as could be, so don’t let it get you down now. We’ve got’, she nods her head briskly at the blind, streaming panes, ‘other people to think of.’
‘Was Miss Emily,’ Dotty asks, stirring cream into her coffee with an odd absorption, ‘was Miss Emily alone at the last?’
Mrs Rafferty hesitates. ‘No, Dorothy,’ she says then. ‘No. She was not alone. Billy Monihan was with her when she passed on. The nurse on duty says he seemed very affected by it, very moved by the old lady. He said,’ Mrs Rafferty adds, ‘he said to the nurse Miss Emily was his aunt.’
‘But Miss Emily doesn’t have any brothers or sisters,’ Cora protests. ‘Minnie told us. She doesn’t have anybody.’
‘Be that as it may,’ Mrs Rafferty seems eager to close the subject, ‘be that as it may, the boy was very moved. Very moved by the whole thing.’
With it raining cats and dogs, and a wind blowing to flatten the city itself, no patients come in to the office all that afternoon. Nobody, that is, except old Mrs Tomolillo. Miss Taylor has just gone out to get two cups of coffee at the dispenser down the hall when Mrs Tomolillo walks in on me, furious and wet as a witch in her black wool year-round dress, waving a soggy lump of papers, ‘Where’s Doctor Chrisman, Doctor Chrisman, I want to know.’
The soggy lump of papers turns out to be Mrs Tomolillo’s own record book which patients are never under any circumstances allowed to get hold of. It is a fine mess, the red, blue and green ink entries of the numerous doctors in the numerous Clinics Mrs Tomolillo frequents blurring into a wild rainbow, dripping colored beads of water and ink even as I take it from her hands, ‘Lies, lies, lies,’ Mrs Tomolillo hisses at me, so I can’t get a word in. ‘Lies.’